Daphne Keller studies the ways that Internet content platforms – and the laws governing them -- shape information access and other rights of ordinary Internet users. As the Director of Intermediary Liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, she has written and spoken widely about the Right to Be Forgotten, copyright notice-and-takedown systems, cross-border content removal orders, platforms’ own discretionary content-removal decisions, and more. She has testified on these topics before legislatures, courts, and regulatory bodies around the world. In her previous role as Associate General Counsel at Google, Daphne worked on cases including Viacom, Perfect 10, Equustek, Mosley, and Metropolitan Schools; and was the primary counsel for products ranging from Web Search to the Chrome browser. Daphne has taught Internet law at Stanford, Berkeley, and Duke law schools. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, and mother to some awesome kids in San Francisco.

This is the last of four posts on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. In both cases, national courts held online news portals liable for comments posted by their users – even though the platforms did not know about the comments.

This is the third of four posts on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. In both cases, national courts held online news portals liable for comments posted by their users – even though the platforms did not know about them. These rulings effectively required platforms to monitor and delete user comments in order to avoid liability.

This is the second of four posts on real-world consequences of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. Both cases arose from national court rulings that effectively required online news portals to monitor users’ speech in comment forums. The first case, Delfi, condoned a monitoring requirement in a case involving threats and hate speech.

Last summer, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered a serious setback to free expression on the Internet. The Court held, in Delfi v. Estonia, that a government could compel a news site to monitor its users’ online comments about articles.* This winter, the Court’s lower chamber ruled the other way in MTE v.

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These comments address the issue of transparency under the GDPR, as that topic arises in the context of Internet intermediaries and the “Right to Be Forgotten.” CIS Intermediary Liability Director Daphne Keller filed them in response to a public call for comments from the Article 29 Working Party – the EU-wide umbrella group of data protection regulators established under the 1995 Directive, soon to be succeeded by the European Data Protection Board established under the GDPR.

This Stanford Center for Internet and Society White Paper uses proposed US legislation, SESTA, as a starting point for an overview of Intermediary Liability models -- and their consequences. It draws on law and experience from both the US and countries that have adopted different models, and recommends specific improvements for SESTA and similar proposed legislation.

Most observers cheered when the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer was booted from YouTube, CloudFlare, and other platforms around the Internet. At the same time, the site’s disappearance stirred anxiety about Internet companies’ power over online speech. It starkly illustrated how online speech can live or die at the discretion of private companies. The modern public square is in private hands.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s political fortunes may be waning in Britain, but her push to make internet companies police their users’ speech is alive and well. In the aftermath of the recent London attacks, Ms. May called platforms like Google and Facebook breeding grounds for terrorism.

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"Policy experts also question how the bill would actually work. Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society pointed to the challenges of determining whether an ad buyer is a foreign entity, particularly if buyers rely on outside vendors to purchase ads.

“Nobody knows how to figure out who counts as Russian,” she said. “It seems extremely easy to hide your identity.”"

"Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society says that the new law could push some platforms and publishers to crack down on a wide variety of speech, to avoid the threat of lawsuits. It would give them “a reason to err on the side of removing internet users’ speech in response to any controversy,” she says, “and in response to false or mistaken allegations, which are often levied against online speech.”"

"“When platforms don’t know what to do, the legally over-cautious response is to go way overboard on taking things down just in case they’re illegal,” Daphne Keller, Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, told BuzzFeed News. “My worst case scenario legislation would be some vague obligation for platforms to make sure that users don’t do bad things.”"

"“Historically, the place you went to exercise your speech rights was the public square. Now the equivalent is Twitter and YouTube and Facebook,” said Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “In a practical matter, how much you can speak is not in the hands of the constitution but in the hands of these private companies.”"

"“Many people suing for harassment have tried to find exemptions under the CDA,” said Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, making the point that the platforms usually win."

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Vinton G. Cerf is one of the founding fathers of the internet, and on Wednesday, February 28th, he will be on Canada 2020’s stage for an exclusive event.

Tickets are free and open to the public, but available in limited quantities. Click below to secure yours.

Known most for being the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the modern Internet, Vint will join us in Ottawa to talk about online citizenship, the right to be forgotten, and state of the modern internet.

Twenty years ago, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Reno v. ACLU established the framework for internet free speech and liability that remains in place today. This conference will consider the continuing viability of the Reno vision in the face of multiplying concerns about sex trafficking online, terrorist content, election interference, and other forms of contested content.

The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School and a part of Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. CIS brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, innovation, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.

Over two years have passed since the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled, in the Google Spain case, that the search engine must “de-list” certain search results on request in order to honor the requesters’ data protection rights.

For many years since the European Data Protection Directive was implemented across Europe in 1998, data privacy was seen as an issue that mainly concerned what companies did with personal data behind the scenes.

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""Half the time it's, 'Oh no, Facebook didn't take something down, and we think that's terrible; they should have taken it down,' " says Daphne Keller, a law professor at Stanford University. "And the other half of the time is, 'Oh no! Facebook took something down and we wish they hadn't.' "

Full episode of "Bloomberg West." Guests include Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, David Kirkpatrick, Techonomy's chief executive officer, Radu Rusu, chief executive officer and co-founder of Fyusion, Crawford Del Prete, IDC's chief research officer, and Daniel Apai, assistant professor at The University of Arizona.

Privacy and free speech aren't fundamentally opposed, but they do have a tendency to come into conflict — and recent developments in Europe surrounding the right to be forgotten have brought this conflict into focus. This week, we're joined by Daphne Keller of Stanford's Center For Internet And Society to discuss the collision between these two important principles.